1. Technical Field
The invention relates to generally to semiconductor electronic devices and, more particularly, to apparatus and methods for manipulating excitations in quantum fluids.
2. Discussion of the Related Art
This section introduces aspects that may be helpful to facilitating a better understanding of the inventions. Accordingly, the statements of this section are to be read in this light and are not to be understood as admissions about what is prior art or what is not the prior art.
The fractional quantum Hall effect (FQHE) produces a set of special equilibrium states with curious properties. The properties are believed to be caused by collective effects between the charge carriers in strong external magnetic fields. The special equilibrium states occur at special partial filling values for the magnetic Landau levels produced by the external magnetic field. In the special equilibrium states, a trapped two-dimensional charge carrier gas is believed to behave as an incompressible fluid droplet, and current conduction by such a gas is believed to occur via excitations on the edge(s) of the fluid droplet.
There is interest in the FQHE, because this system may provide an advantageous realization of a quantum computer. In particular, some FQHE systems may have multi-excitation states that obey nonabelian statistics. The nonabelian statistics of such multi-excitation states are believed to be related to topological quantum numbers. For that reason, it may be useful to use such multi-excitation states to represent the states of a qubit in a quantum computer. Indeed, the topological nature of the nonabelian statistics could protect such multi-excitation states from being changed by perturbations in such physical systems. For that reason, using such topological states to represent the states of a qubit could enable a realization of quantum computers in which the susceptability to calculation errors is orders of magnitude lower than those expected in other realizations of quantum computers.